


Clearance Sale (Everything Must Go)

by yellow_caballero



Series: Scott's Life is Hard [3]
Category: X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men Evolution
Genre: Emma Frost is not a bitch, Gen, Magneto is a trolling asshole, Scott Summers is a smug asshole, The Amazing Rock-Girl makes her sparkling debut, The X-Factor are too good too pure, if you think Emma is out of character you're probably right, if you think any character is out of character you're probably right, in which emmas life gets exponentially worse and then a little bit better maybe, like a prada clad angel falling from heaven
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-13
Updated: 2017-05-13
Packaged: 2018-10-31 08:37:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10895667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yellow_caballero/pseuds/yellow_caballero
Summary: Emma Frost has lost it all: her money, her company, her boyfriend, her creepy super villain club, her dignity. (Un)luckily for her, The Master of Magnetism believed in second chances. But after those meddling kids kick her to the curb and conveniently forget she exists she had to find her own way, left with only her brains and a desperate 'fuck you' attitude. Sometimes that has to be enough. And one way or another, Scott Summers is going to get what's coming to him.In which Emma Frost meets several two by fours, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Scott Summer's dad jeans, The Amazing Rock Girl, some birds, and the girl in the beer freezer.





	Clearance Sale (Everything Must Go)

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place about seven years past Evolution, so Scott and Emma are 25. Additionally, neither this fic nor this universe will feature Scott/Emma, considering my childhood exposure to that ship was them making out on Jean's grave and that kind of thing puts you off romance for life.

Emma’s head slammed into the brick wall, and thought for the first time in her life that she was going to die.

If things like mortality or personal responsibility had ever occurred to Emma before then she probably wouldn’t have been in that situation. Death and poverty happened to people on television. Mafiosos and bad people spoke with bad italian accents like they were chewing rocks and that you can’t really be that poor if you’re so fat. Emma had met mafiosos, seen poverty, and heard death happen in the other room. But none of those were necessarily bad things, and nobody who did them were that bad people, really. It definitely wasn’t her problem.

The brick behind her diamond head shattered into sand, raining down fine chunks of gravel and sticking in the facets of her hair. She tried to pull herself up, legs shaking too hard to stand until she had fallen on her ass three times. She grabbed onto the slightly pulverised brick wall and leaned on it until her diamond fingers began to crumble it further, and began to realize that she would die standing up just as well as sitting down.

But being stabbed with drill bits by Magneto lying down was really just too embarrassing.

Magneto drifted through the hole blasted into the wall, damn helmet still snug on that hideous, wrinkly old face. He had ditched the tacky purple and gold ensemble a few years back and appeared to have settled on a set of thick grey body armor shot with streaks of silver to match his stupid little helmet. As soon as she got out of this she was going to buy Wakanda’s stock of adamantium mines and then set them all on fire, forever.

“Your mutation’s very useful,” he said casually, drifting closer and closer to her. Emma spat gem shards on the ground, posing herself into a mockery of a fighting stance. “Body of diamond with toenails worth a small car. A weapon of a mind. And you waste it all.”

“Fuck you.”

There were three spinning pieces of metal hovering above his hand, orbiting each other in a whirring cloud of shrapnel like a molecule. She could hear the faint whistling sound rushing through them as he drifted closer and closer to her, like a high pitched buzzsaw. Emma didn’t dare tear her eyes away from Magneto to look for an escape route, as she knew there wasn’t one. He was too close now. Maybe if she knocked off his helmet, surprised him -

“These are diamond cut routers. It takes machines the size of you and I to cut and polish real diamonds, of course. Thousands of dollars of machinery dependent on a million pieces of little metal.” He spun the pieces of metal faster and faster until they were almost invisible in a chopping whir. “Diamond cut routers are the only tool that can do the job, diamond to diamond. Talk about a rock and a hard place.” He smiled. It was horrific. “But I suppose you would know everything about that.”

Emma was still leaning on the brick wall, and for the five hundredth time that day she hated him.

They were in a dark, abandoned corner of New York City, far underground where even the subway tunnels didn’t go. Emma wasn’t much one for the theatrics of an underground supervillain lair, of course, but it wasn’t as if she was a supervillain. Besides, it had made her feel kind of cool. It was Sebastian’s idea anyway, the idiot, probably would have been on a plane to Jamaica leaving her high and dry if it wasn’t for this fucking gang of superpowered teenagers. And thanks to _fucking_ Sebastian Shaw and the _fucking_ Hellfire club she was going to be explored into a million tiny pieces by this nonagenarian with a god complex. Fucking perfect.

Magneto, apparently reading her thoughts, which was her job goddamit, smiled. He didn’t smirk, he smiled. He didn’t need to smirk. “Abandoned by your Hellfire Fraternity. Assets seized. Compatriots hunted down and all business ventures closed. Twenty five years old and you’re left with nothing but diamond skin and a tainted soul.”

“And a brain that can make you stab yourself with a rusted pipe,” Emma snarled. “Take off that helmet and I’ll show you what a big man you are.”

“Turn off your skin and I’ll let you,” Magneto said, amused. He was in her face now, towering over her stocking feet and sliced knees. She had lost her shoes in her mad sprint for freedom, overturned in a stinking pile of garbage and feces, and now her feet were coated in who knows what. “It’s pretty easy to pick a fight with diamond skin.”

Emma shifted her stance and threw her weight into punching the older man in the gut, who caught her hand before it made a few feet. Her eyes widened, pushing her first against his, the five pounds of sheer diamond not even moving his gloved fist. His other hand was still moving the drill bits faster and faster.

“But I suppose you’ve worked for everything you have,” Magneto said. “Used your powers and your money. Without your powers you’re nothing, Emma. When all that you are can be taken away, you’re nothing at all.”

Emma closed her eyes and grit her teeth as she heard the drill bits fire straight for her throat. She waited for them to land, thinking about how she didn’t want to die this pathetic. They were whirring in her ears, her heart was threatening to leap out of her diamond skin, and the overbearing presence of Magneto was breathing hot and heavy down on her, suffocating and encroaching on her life.

Nothing happened.

Emma opened her eyes. Magneto was still smiling at her. “Oh, did you think I was going to kill you?”

“Uh,” Emma said, “yeah?”

He laughed. It was horrible. “Oh no, Cyclops would kill me if I did that. That little menace.” The bits fell down onto the floor, their clatters echoing in the dimly lit tunnel. “I hope you’ll be a good girl from now on. No powers. No criminal enterprises. No speeding tickets. No more White Queen. I’ll know, Emma.” He leaned closer, the insane glint in his blue eyes cutting into her. “And some things Cyclops doesn’t need to know. Goodbye, Emma.”

He was gone much quicker than he came. Emma watched him float back through the ruined wall and into the tunnel until he disappeared from sight. Probably leaving through the back passageway into the Hellfire Club, its opulence shredded and overturned, chandeliers that had swung overhead brought crashing into a thousand beautiful fragments on the ground. She knew where he would go. Leave the ancient piece of Gothic architecture to return to the flowing crowds of New York City. Ditch his get up and disappear into the crowd, like Emma would have to do the minute she could stand, get her breathing back in order.

Emma Frost watched Magneto drift away, and somehow for once she hated herself instead of somebody else.

  


Levis from Goodwill, Emma was beginning to find, didn’t last as those from Neiman Marcus. Two weeks and she had already ripped them on a rusty nail, in such a gapingly hideous way that she didn’t know if she would be able to repair them. Was she supposed to know how to sew now? Why did everybody want so many things from her?

They wanted her to walk twenty minutes from her office building to a bus stop, where she could have a nice little time sitting on a hard plastic seat all the way to practically the other end of Bayville to her apartment. Her nice little apartment. There was a nicer apartment building a few blocks down, of course, which actually had a pool. Emma was beginning to find that for Bayville that was pretty deluxe. Emma was beginning to find a lot of things.

The twenty minutes from her office building to the bus stop was spent mostly feeling the rip in her jeans rub in a really annoying way against her kneecap, which took her away from the arduous task of feeling sorry for herself. She was walking through what passed for the center of Bayville, as she did every morning and night to her secretary job at Layman Inc., a legal firm that was disappointingly completely aboveboard. She had checked extensively, feeling the cold hard gaze of Magneto over her shoulder the entire time. Backpack slung over her shoulder (Jansport), denim baseball cap pulled down tight over her head (Adidas), and earbuds blasting to overpower the disgusting shrill of laughing children (Brittney Spears, as two different pitches of disgusting shrills tended to cancel each other out), she felt like an imposter. Hoped she was an imposter.

She had walked past a gas station, a perfectly good park filled with crying children, a CVS, and at least five people sprinting away before she noticed that anything weird might be going on. Tugging her earbuds out, she finally heard the cacophony of car alarms and police sirens that lit up the completely nonplussed growing crowd of people. For every person that was running away there were two people running towards it, mostly giggling groups of teenagers and elderly men carrying large bags of popcorn. A man on a bicycle ice cream stand was setting up shop near one police car, arguing with a policeman while passing out tweety-bird lollies.

Like most of this town, apparently, this was the most exciting thing that had happened to Emma all month. She slouched into her hoodie, quickly popping in a piece of gum, and crept closer to the police cars. She sincerely didn’t want to know if she’d be recognized, but seeing as she didn’t recognize herself in Converse she was probably safe. She pushed through the crowd until she saw several more neurotic people also taking cover behind the police cars, and it was only through Emma jumping onto the hood of the car in a move she really hoped wasn’t illegal that she was able to see what was going on.

A man in kevlar was spitting a bright red beam into the chest of another man who  screaming and groaning against the neon hiss of the ruby light. The meatier, stupider looking man was fighting against the beam, muscles jumping and elongating to twice their size before being beat down into shape again. Emma snapped her gum, fascinated. Nobody actually seemed that concerned, with shopkeepers carefully rolling down the metal covers bringing sidewalk signs like it was a hurricane. The man in kevlar was slowly advancing onto the twisting figure, who was still enlarging random body parts and withering them again. His head blew into cartoonish proportions before deflating just as fast, and as one foot grew it overbalanced him and he fell over. He ducked behind the beam as he fell, and only after the minute he escaped from it he completed a transformation.

The man exploded, fits of flesh swelling until he was three times his previous size. Now about a story tall, he slammed his feet on the ground and roared, throwing out his arms against the man’s lasers and screaming something unintelligible.

Two cowering teenagers next to Emma were chatting and unwrapping some McDonald’s. Emma unabashedly listened in.

“I can’t believe the sidewalk still looks intact. Look at that, it’s barely cracked.”

“I think they’ve been reinforcing it lately, putting in some kind of fancy material in it. Dad said it was kind of a hassle for the city government but since that bill was passed it’s gotten a lot easier.”

The teenage boy took another bite out of his burger, chewing loudly. “Damn muties.”

“God, I know, they’re amazing.”

Emma felt weirdly proud. She looked back out at the scene. The man with the visor didn’t seem all that upset by the fact that his adversary how had hands the size of frying pans, casually walking forwards as the two incredible powers fought against each other. There had to be more to this. They were like cockroaches: there never were just one. She looked around, noticing flashes of body armor peeking out of eaves and alleys. There was one notable figure perched on the corner of a five story roof like it was a starting line, knees bending as she seemed to stretch and peer over the dizzying roof to the unfolding drama.

Finally the man raised one hand and flicked a switch on the visor with the other, cutting off the beam. The beast, who had been grappling with the it like it was a wrestling match, overbalanced and started tipping forward onto the ground. The girl on the roof jumped and, with a piercing scream that had every onlooker wincing and covering their ears, landed with one hundred and ten pounds of force and unerring aim right on the head of the monster. Emma winced again at the crack of his head on the sidewalk, which had finally broken under the strain of a very large man hitting the ground with very high force.

The flying girl, who Emma now noted had strange webbing on the armpits of her very tacky green costume, bounced up and down on the balls of her feet while the man gave her a high five. The kevlar bodies disappeared back into the alleys and eaves as the hulking man shrived back into one slightly scrawny nerd. Emma watched the onlookers cheer and the police finally run out onto the arena, one stopping to chat with the man in the visor as the girl bounced around happily.

Cyclops shook the hand of the policeman, and Emma was struck with hate.

Once upon a time it had been her up there. Everyone looked at her, against or with her, marvelling at the weight of her mind and diamond skin. Now she was stuck resentfully popping her gum and worrying at the tear in her jeans. She was wearing a backpack. She was watching the man who singlehandedly ruined her life hug a redheaded little girl and shaking the hand of vietnam veterans.

She slipped out of the crowd and resumed walking home. As if she cared.

  
  
  


The man who singlehandedly ruined her life didn’t go away, disappointingly. Her scratchy little TV in the kitchen played his smug little visor as Emma ate her mac and cheese out of the pot, imagining each little piece of macaroni she squished was his head. The cracking linoleum tile was her kingdom, and these cockroaches were her subjects. She threw macaroni at the ground, still imagining it as Cyclops’ head, and watched the cockroaches devour it. Good.

She cleaned up the pot and bowl combination and rinsed them out in the sink, shoved Vogue magazines in the corner and resigned herself to abusing Fresh Prince of Bel-Air until she fell asleep again. She watched Will Smith run eagerly on set again, and again and again, making endless cracks about how he didn’t understand rich people as the studio audience laughed and advertisements for the Magic Bullet attempted to win her over. Classic fish out of water narrative. Emma pulled her ratty blanket closer, burrowing deep into her couch. Stupid.

Days began to pass like that, growing into months. Emma bought a nicer blanket, and most days began to make it to her bed to fall asleep. She had to buy new jeans, but she borrowed a book on how to sew from the library. She hadn’t really been in many libraries before, and the librarian seemed kind of condescending. Emma had reflexively attempted to reach for her mind and pinch it a little before the haunting specter of Magneto’s eyes flashed at her again and she backed off. She liked the sewing book though. She went back again the next week for three more, and one more secret harlequin novel snuck into her basket.

Her job was boring but there was sick thrill of excitement watching the little numbers in her bank account rise up from nothing. She had only began patting herself on the back and promising herself a new bag when her washing machine gave out and she had to call for a new part. That was half of her savings gone. More and more savings began to disappear - a lost purse, a new shingle for the roof. A return to the library for a book on how to repair roofs, complete with a far more forgiving librarian.

Her boss at work looked at her platinum blonde hair and thought she was a moron, and didn’t listen to her at all when she tried to convince him that his filing system was crappy and that he was crappy. Apparently you weren’t allowed to call your bosses crappy, which was ridiculous when it was so obviously true. She thought about Magneto again. Everybody was condescending these days, and rude, and never looked at her. Summer started and her new wardrobe stayed the same, and there was no nice clothing to make men look at her either.

She was looking at her reflection in the glass window of the beer freezer in the convenience store, squinting her eyes and trying to recognize that girl with the high ponytail and cheap makeup covering purple bags. It wasn’t like it didn’t look like her. Actually, she looked a lot like somebody Emma once knew. Maybe herself, younger. Maybe somebody else.

Emma had only dumped her beer and tampons on the counter when there was a small explosion outside the window. She turned and saw a gas pump getting a dented base as a man who looked suspiciously like a lizard tried to eat another man who looked suspiciously like Bobby Drake, that tool who didn’t even deserve to riff of her image.  The convenience store cashier, a scrawny man with an improbable beard, looked out the window too, pausing while ringing up her beer.

He leaned over the counter, ignoring Emma completely as he strained for a better view. “Morons,” he said, “this is a freaking gas station. Something’s going to blow up.”

“Definitely morons.” Emma paused. “Did that seem like a lizard to you?”

“Whatever. Hey, I think that’s Mrs. Hayworth’s car.”

“The florist? Shit.” Emma stepped backwards a few paces. It was indeed Mrs. Hayworth’s car. The lizardman and the idiot coed were currently too occupied throwing around shards of ice and property damage to notice that someone hadn’t moved onto a different gas station for their morning commute. A single tan volvo was still parked next to an undamaged pump, an elderly woman sitting sobbing in fear in the front seat. Emma felt a spike of pity for the old crone who was too stupid to even move from her car when there wasn’t a man, woman, or child left in this town who lost their heads at a lizardman attack anymore. Sometimes this resulted in a small but thriving economy based off of the superhero spectator sport, but mostly it also meant everyone evacuated in a nice, single file line to somewhere a slightly safer distance away. Poor old bint was probably just frantically pressing the button on her life alert and forgetting that her car door was unlocked.

The cashier looked oddly upset. “Mrs. Hayworth’s practically senile, she doesn’t know to get out of her car.” He winced as the Iceman threw an icicle at the lizardman’s head and the reptile beat it away with a swipe of his hand. The cashier looked at Emma, looked back at the scene, then bit his lip. “Somebody has to do something before she gets hurt.”

“Let the mutie do it,” Emma drawled, scraping her tampons and beer into a plastic bag. “It’s all he’s good for anyway.”

This time he was looking back at at her, slightly incredulous and slightly disgusted. “Freaking republicans. Drake’s doing a lot more than you.”

Emma’s mouth dropped open, scandalized. The cashier broke his eyes away from the scene and began reaching under the counter. She watched as he grunted around, before grabbing what seemed like an unreasonably big baseball bat with nails beat into it. Emma’s mouth stayed open.

“You seriously think you can beat off a six foot lizard and rescue an old lady with a rusty piece of wood?” A brief explosion rocked them, and there was a distinct smell of burning air. Cyclops had arrived. Emma turned back to the strange cashier, oddly relieved. “There, now your precious hero Cyclops is here. He rescues old ladies all damn day, let him do it.”

“Lady, this is a fucking gas station, and those are fucking laser beams. He’s as useless as you and me.”

Cyclops seemed to have realized the same thing and turned off his laser beams. Emma saw him standing there, leaning forward but staying back, and even how his hands were clenched into fists. Iceman was still ducking and weaving with the mutant lizard, with cracks of ice shattering and reforming again and again. Mrs. Hayworth, in Cyclop’s blind spot but increasingly closer to the melee, hadn’t stopped crying. Magneto had pointed drill bits at her and told her that if she ever used her powers again that he would drive the thirty minutes from his house to hers and kill her.

Emma reached over and grabbed the rusty baseball bat out of the cashier’s hands, noting his complete lack of muscle and the gaping expression that hadn’t left his bearded little face. “I’ll show you useless, honey.”

Emma slung the baseball bat over her shoulder and pushed the door open, listening to the bell tinkle against the sounds of a battlezone.

That woman staring back at her in the convenience store freezer had sold what little clothes she could scavenge to buy a bus ticket to Bayville, hugging her nylon backpack close to her chest as she watched the Manhattan city skyline recede into the distance. She hadn’t cried on the bus but she cried in the apartment, frizzy strands of blonde hair falling around her ears as she sat down on the linoleum tile and realized she had nothing to unpack. That woman was wearing an old t-shirt and sweatpants because it had been her period and she had only taken a break from her Full House marathon to walk down to the convenience store and buy some freaking tampons. That woman had, two decades ago, made a little girl in her kindergarten class bawl her eyes out because she had noticed her father hadn’t come to parent teacher night and told her that her father hated her because she was so ugly he couldn’t bear to look at her. It made her feel good, and twenty years later it was still making her feel good, and now she was swinging a baseball bat in her arms wondering why that stupid reflection was the first time she had recognized herself in the mirror for years.

“Hello, sweet cheeks,” she said, waiting for the lizard monster to turn around in confusion. Then she drove the rusty nails into the lizard’s jaw.

The lizardman recoiled, yowling in pain, as Iceman quickly lept into action and froze his feet to the ground.  Emma hit it with the bat again, watching scales peel off and green blood beginning to spurt. She had been kind of off with her aim that time so she hit it again. By that time Iceman was beginning to look slightly alarmed and Cyclops had jogged over to them, also looking slightly alarmed. Emma kicked the lizardman, because she thought that kicking Cyclops might end badly.

“Who the fuck are you?”

Emma turned to him sweetly, driving one tennis shoe into the lizard’s eye socket. “Someone who is clearly far more qualified than you, obviously. Hello, Summers.”

Summers, which was a stupid last name that somewhat childishly made Emma feel like they were natural born rivals, looked fairly relaxed about the whole thing as Iceman began to look really distressed.

“Ma’am, not that you aren’t terrifying, but I assure you we can handle our jobs just fine. We wouldn’t want anyone in danger.”

Emma cocked a thumb at the volvo. “That’s fascinating. Because it looks like a little old lady was sitting in that tacky vehicle crying her eyes out because someone couldn’t look over their own bollocks enough to get the civvies out of the way.”

Cyclops turned to look at the Iceman, who let the ice melt off of him enough so she could tell he looked deeply ashamed. Emma got the unshakable feeling Cyclops was raising his eyebrows, although it was impossible to tell. “Are you serious, Bobby? You didn’t evacuate the old lady?”

“I’m sorry! Jesus, I was a little busy, sorry!” Bobby was rapidly quailing under Cyclop’s intense red gaze. “I know, I know, christ! Just stop looking at me like that!”

“We’re finishing this up at home,” Cyclops said dangerously. He turned back to her. “Thank you so much. Apparently someone,” someone clearly being Bobby, who was beginning to look faintly sick, “needs some more danger room simulations this week.”

“You didn’t notice her either,” Emma said, unimpressed. She had seen this man knee the most powerful underworld tycoon in the gut and then lecture him on business ethics, and he had missed both the fact that there was a crying old lady who Bobby was quickly running off to console and that he personally had ruined her life. “Whatever. Have fun ruining other people’s lives, Summers, since it seems to be your only hobby.”

She turned around and waved, shouldering the rusty bat again and letting a distant part of herself wish that she was wearing something more intimidating than sweatpants and a soft cotton t-shirt.

When she had thrown an extra gallon of ice cream into her plastic bag the cashier didn’t complain, still looking at her with a dumbfounded expression.

“Did you just tear Scott Summers a new one?”

She grabbed her bag, eager to just get out of there. She had cramps, and didn’t care that Cyclops had a human name and probably wasn’t born with laser eye beams exploding the hospital roof.  “I’m a supervillain, honey. It’s what I do.”

She walked home, whistling a jaunty tune.

 

A cat had started hanging around outside her window, enticed closer by fish nugget leftovers. Emma was impressed by its self control, as she personally was incredibly weak for fish nuggets, but she supposed cats were naturally standoffish that way. Keeping your distance to make them salivate and fantasize, then steal their food and leave. It was a good scam, and Emma was happy to fall for it so long as she could do her best to make the cat stay. She started thinking about finding something that didn’t have fleas, maybe the nice slick little black one in the pet store she had often ducked into when she walked to the grocery store.

In her three months in exile, deep in the midst of a hot and sticky July that made her deeply regret the lack of an air conditioned car, her apartment had began to accumulate softer blankets and TV guides, stuff useless and practical and everywhere in between. Each thing she owned had a story - that bright orange cookpot she had found at Tuesday Morning for a great deal, a figurine of a horse closely resembling the one she had as a little girl that Tammy from work had given her. She had some kind of feeling in her chest when she looked at gifts, like a blanket but wrapped around a heart. It was distinctly...fuzzy. It made her uncomfortable, but sometimes it was nice. Her work still made her want to scream the scream of those who radically overqualified for her job but couldn’t exactly give references from her previous secret Illuminati business experience, but her coworkers were warming up to her. Emma had assumed that people with a net worth under fifty thousand dollars couldn’t possibly have anything useful to say but they kept on giving her cooking advice and looked alarmed when she said that she tended to burn pasta.

Emma, eating Dreyer’s out of the container feeling very good about the presence of ice cream in her life, was watching the news when they started playing footage of whatever new debacle the X-Assholes had stepped in today. She ate her ice cream, for once thankful that she was at home eating ice cream instead of out there getting punched and being stressed out about possibly getting punched. She was wearing sweatpants again with her hair tied in a messy bun, but so long as she didn’t go outside and start beating up any lizardmen nobody had to know.

That was the third time she had more-or-less ran into the X-Assholes, but she saw them again on her way to work the next morning. It was the same guy, apparently having gotten away the last time, and a giant purple robot with a girl jammed in it was beating it up. Emma sat back in her poky little plastic bus seat, deciding that they could handle things just well on their own this time. No more little old ladies for her to white knight (ha) over.

Tammy and Michael were gossiping over the coffee bar when she got there, cups of coffee cooling in their hands as Emma painted her nails and surreptitiously looked over their tax returns. She had noticed a discrepancy last week, little things appointments she had booked here and there that hadn’t made its way into the accounting book. She knew lawyers took clients under the table plenty of times, but these fees were getting higher and higher and soon the IRS would start poking around. Emma didn’t have a rap sheet that was unclassified, but she was still expecting Magneto to jump out from under a cubicle and she wasn’t taking any chances. Besides, it was tacky.

“I saw that little Terry girl and really wanted to shake her hand, you know, but Mr. Summers always asks us not to approach them like that in public,” Tammy was saying, sipping at her coffee. “Can’t blame him, they get enough publicity as it is.”

“I wouldn’t want grown men walking up to my daughter all the time,” Michael said. “No matter what group home they live in.”

“Isn’t it a boarding school?”

Michael rolled his eyes. “If that’s what they’re going with.”

Emma rolled her chair away from her desk, not bothering to pretend that she wasn’t eavesdropping. “They’re a boarding school?”

“Yeah, of course. I mean, they go to the high school, but it’s still technically a boarding school. Lot of hassle to just have kids living there for no reason.”

“The same high school that wouldn’t let that little girl in?” Michael asked. “It was pretty horrible.”

Emma rolled her chair closer, eager for the drama. “What happened?”

“Oh, little Ruth Aldine has a physical mutation where she doesn’t have any eyes. She’s such a sweet girl but she’s creepy as hell.”

“Ruth once told me my car keys were under the fridge,” Tammy offered, “and when I lost them a week later I wasn’t even late for work thanks to her.”

What a real superhero. “What was that about the high school?”

“Well, it was the middle school. The high school’s pretty used to it, I think. But they didn’t want a blind girl with no eyes going there, too much hassle or something. I heard the ACLU helped Mr. Summers sue, it was a really big deal. People are saying it’s the biggest step for mutant civil rights since he punched Tony Stark in the face.”

Emma didn’t know how that helped civil rights, but she hated Tony Stark more than she hated Summers (difficult) so she didn’t mind it. Tammy, who was very happy working at a small legal firm, perked up. “Think it’ll get to the supreme court?”

“If the ACLU has their way. They’re gunning for another Brown v. Board of Education. Right now schools are turning away practically everyone with physical mutations, saying they’d be a distraction. It’s really bullshit, no wonder so many lizardmen are attacking.”

Emma discreetly started rolling herself back, thankful that there had been no camera crews during the Baseball Bat of Empowerment Incident. She had almost made it back to her desk when another thought occurred to her. “They haven’t having the little girl dress up in spandex and fight crime, are they?”

Michael snorted. “She’s ten. I highly doubt she does anything besides watch Pokemon and make charm bracelets.”

The idea was worrying to Emma, who was having a difficult time conceptualizing any of the X-Men as buying a bracelet kit and a stuffed Pikachu for a ten year old. It was somehow far easier to imagine Summers fighting a court case for her, probably feeling very smug about campaigning for civil rights and kissing the poster of Martin Luther King hanging by his bed every night. She couldn’t even imagine the man buying dish soap, much less doing anything that wasn’t orchestrating his life to spite her.

It wasn’t until she caught herself buying dish soap at the dollar store that she realized maybe Summers had a hard time imagining her doing the same. To be honest, she doubted that he thought of her at all. The thought was infuriating and she threw the soap harder in her basket then she meant to, feeling strangely powerless.

The next day she collected the tax returns, her notes, print outs of his schedule, a lot of receipts, and a lot of other paperwork and forms that hadn’t been filled out, filed, or only half-way completed. She knocked on her boss’s door and walked in, holding her thick manilla envelope loosely in her hand.

Mr. Layman was a small, poky lawyer and a small, poky man. Emma stood three inches taller than him in her understated yet professional black heels and a matching pencil skirt, and he knew she was more intimidating than her and not intimidated by him and hated her for it. He pretended he didn’t hate her but she hated him in turn and she knew what hate looked like. And what kind of asshole thinks she’s stupid for being blonde, anyway?

“What do you need, Emma?” he asked, typing a form onto his computer. “I only have a few minutes.”

She opened the file and tossed a few of the papers on his desk. “Your tax returns are shit. You didn’t file the Gonzalez case, which made a shit ton of money, and it’s really freaking obvious when you match the form and expenses. That’s the files for Gonzalez and I have five more, not including the ones that aren’t glaringly obvious. We’re going to get audited and if I get audited there is a very scary man with drill bits who seems to think that standing by is just as bad as not doing anything. I’m a genius but a brain dead fifty year old woman who thinks she can fit into a tankini could figure this out, much less the IRS. If you don’t do something about this we’re both going to get in trouble.”

Mr. Layman turned red and five minutes of intense arguing later Emma was fired. It was an unexpected result, given that she was used to verbally crushing men into dust and hadn’t yet met anyone who was too stupid to be argued with, much less win one. She hadn’t even thought of herself as someone who could get fired. She collected her things in a daze, emptying out her desk drawers filled with makeup and office supplies into a small box she kept and watching Tammy gape at her.

The woman stood up, enraged. “Are you kidding me? You’re a genius, Emma, you don’t have to put up with this.”

“At will employment is charming.” Emma tossed the manilla envelope on Tammy’s desk. “Take this to the IRS, will you dear? I’m currently laying low otherwise I would do it. Ciao.”

Emma took the elevator down to the office lobby and walked out in a daze, heels clicking on the floor. She felt oddly like that one time she had drove a woman’s cake making shop out of business because she had called her a slut and make crappy petit fours. Emma just didn’t stand for crappy petit fours, they were a crime against God.

She walked down to the bus stop like it was any other day, already planning what she was going to make for dinner. Maybe spaghetti again, and take tomorrow off but begin looking for jobs the day after that. The sensation of feeling horrible and powerless, subject to the whims and half-assed crimes of someone else, was fuzzy and held tight against the numb shock of someone throwing around her life it was a chew toy. She wanted to reach out with her mental hand and crush his brain, feel his psyche tearing. She wanted to turn her skin to diamond and rip through his pudgy, fleshy fist with one handshake. She wasn’t going to get a good reference out of this. Nobody wanted to hire a snitch. Emma sure as hell wouldn’t.

Emma was walking down the street, self pity wrapped around her like a London Fog coat, when a squashy demon thing crashed into the storefront window in front of her. Emma looked on, unimpressed. It was one of those imp things from the hell dimension she had found Azazel in, that creep who was still pretending to be Nightcrawler’s father. Imps barely had brains to speak of, and even if she did have the daring to use her powers they wouldn’t have done much good.

On the other hand, Emma was mad and really wanted to hurt something. This wasn’t a new feeling. Emma used to always want to hurt something, but this was a different feeling. If she had been five feet closer to the store window that thing would have smashed into her. If Tammy had been here, staging a dramatic walkout with her in a show of female solidarity, she could have been smashed into. Emma had a blanket, sitcom reruns, and a cat lurking outside her apartment window. Emma had just been fired.

“Oh, fuck this,” she said, and picked up a two by four.

Somehow a large and muscular woman smashing a large block of wood into a nasty’s head seemed to do the trick. The beast howled, rubbing at his head and turning towards Emma with a snarl. He sucked in a deep breath and Emma reflexively dove to the side, scraping her elbows on the road as a roar of heat and a thick spurt of fire blasted where she had been standing seconds ago.

On second thought, maybe a piece of wood didn’t solve every problem.

Emma kicked off her shoes, already noticing cars screeching to a halt and honking, people casually stepping outside their cars and walking away. She hoped distantly that they had good car insurance - did living in Bayville count as a pre-existing condition? She hoped not. The demon was still staring at her, before apparently not counting her as enough of a threat and turning around back to its adversary just before receiving a laser beam to the face.

Great, Summers again. Just the shit icing on top of her turd of a day. She scowled, taking the opportunity to hit the demon with her improvised bat again while it was down. Now that she had heels again it was far easier to drive one into the eye of the imp, which howled again and began to look fairly miserable. She had gotten a few good kicks in before Summers had jogged over, once again looking alarmed.

Her two by four was now so many splinters she just dropped it. Summers took the opportunity to motion her to step back, which she gladly did, and leaned closer to the demon’s face. For a brief, surreal second Emma thought he was going to kiss it, but he reached up a hand to flick the corner of his visor and the demon got a close contact, full powered laser brain straight to the face. It disappeared in a poof of smoke and a blood curdling scream. Summers turned back to her, and she somehow got the impression he was squinting behind those visors.

“Aren’t you the girl with the bat with nails stuck in?”

“Oh, give the man a prize,” Emma drawled, “remember me for my lumber. Honestly, Summers, I have no idea how you lived this long with such keen powers of observation.”

She stood obligingly still has he squinted at her some more, turned his head around slightly, maybe closed one eye and then closed the other. Something about the different outfit may have done it - the pencil skirt and the heels, the naturalistic brushing of makeup and a look that could wither balls. He did a double take.

“Emma Frost?”

“Extraordinaire.” She looked back at the empty crater where the demon had been. “Are all of your adversaries so colorful?”

“We thought you were dead!”

“I wish I was. These heels are from TJ Maxx, Summers. I hold you personally responsible for this understated, yet professional cheap plastic monstrosity.”

Summers looked at her, looked at the crater, then looked back at her, clearly flabbergasted. “Am I hallucinating? Why are you beating up criminals with wood?”

“Because your doddering old terrorist grandfather haunts my dreams, that’s why. I was just fired from my job and I am holding you personally responsible. My job was as a _secretary_ and I am holding you personally responsible for that too.” She began brushing splinters off of her hand, pleased that even in its natural state her mutations still made her hands unusually thick and tough. She had unsuccessfully tried to scrub the calluses off for hours when she was a teenager, but eventually she had settled for sophisticated opera gloves and the deeply hidden insecurity that there was an imperfection on her body. “Now if you excuse me, I have a three story walkup and a date with careerbuilder.com and boxed wine.”

Summers just stared at her for a long moment. She had seen him do it more than one, stay silent and still until whatever passed for his brain had chewed over every aspect of the situation. She had suspected more than once the man wasn’t actually all that bright - she had seen his IQ and test scores - but he had a cunning mind for problem solving and leadership and she was willing to admit that. Scott Summers knew people, which sometimes was more useful than having laser beams that shoot out of his eyes. Emma knew that better than anyone. She was beginning to find that ruthlessly manipulating people without scanning their mind was a little difficult.

Eventually, he seemed to make up his mind on something. She suspected that she wouldn’t like it. “Come back to the house with me,” he said.

Yep, she didn’t like it. “I have no desire to do that,” she said flatly.

“Are you going to continue beating up random criminals with wood?” Summers asked archly. “Because this is the second time and I know you threw rocks at that creep Monet was trying to beat up.”

She flushed. She thought that nobody has seen that. It had been a rough day. “Only you would call a four story mansion a house, Summers. Now take yourself, your tacky little kevlar, and your clunky plastic death trap of a visor and leave me alone. You’ve ruined my life enough already.”

“I don’t even know what I did. I didn’t even know you were alive.”

“Why? Because you figured if I was still skulking around, I just had to be doing vaguely sinister acts of criminal larceny? I have a live outside of being punched in the face by your ring of teenage mobsters, Summers.”

She didn’t used to, of course, and by they way Summers was raising his eyebrow he knew that too. Graciously letting it go, he said, “And you just so happened to move to Bayville, where me and my team live, and not literally any other city in New York, because you hated being punched in the face by my gang of teenage mobsters so much.”

Emma had her reasons but she wasn’t about to share them with Scott Summers, of all people. “Where is your little circus act, anyway? Everyone knows a codependent X-Man never works alone.”

“It’s a school day,” Scott said blandly. Of course it was.

“Whatever,” Emma turned sharply on her heel, cursing as it wobbled slightly. It was cracked. Of course it was too. “Just leave me alone, Summers. It’ll be the nicest thing you’ve ever done for me.”

She walked away in her pencil skirt trying not to hobble on her broken heel, hoping she was at least somewhat sexier this time.

 

But from then on it was harder to ignore. Maybe it was the fact that she had started celebrating her newfound unemployment by changing up where she was filling out application forms, with the library one day and an indulgent cup of Starbucks the next. The twee little parks she weren’t really all bad - the adorable little death traps of a children’s playground only took up one section of it, really, and there were always nice jogging trails for her to beef up her already impressive leg muscles. Whoever said muscular women weren’t attractive she had probably punched in the face at one point in her life.

There was a stunning amount of strangely beautiful birds around, elegant and sleek with understated flashes of color, and Emma identified with them so much she started renting birdwatching books from the librarian she now knew the name of. She could name a lot of the local ones now: longheaded shrikes, grey and blue jays, black billed magpies. She arranged a ride with Tammy, who actually seemed to be a friend now, down to a lake and carefully sketched all the birds she had found. Tammy was tolerantly amused, as she had grown up in the Pacific Northwest and was thoroughly unimpressed by wildlife. In return she took Tammy shopping and got some decent clothes, for Christ’s sake.

She was lonely, but it was hard to admit. Coming home to an empty apartment wasn’t so bad, as she had done it all her life. One day she walked in, setting her purse on the bookshelf near the door next to the key dish and realized with a cold shock that she wanted somebody to come home to. She had dated, but never loved. Nobody had ever loved her. She hadn’t known that before.

There was a lot of ice cream and Fresh Prince of Bel-Air that night, as she now enjoyed Will Smith making fun of rich people. She couldn’t sleep that night, thinking of expenses and the piling bills and getting a new job, but not regretting losing her old one. It wasn’t a lot of fun being poor. She couldn’t buy nice food anymore, or look at her bank account without a strange sense of anxiety. Emma barely even knew what anxiety felt like. It wasn’t altogether that pleasant, and she put down a brief assessment of it in her bird book: “Strange shaking feeling in throat. May be sick. Investigate further.”

She had seen strange little crimes twice now, and had thrown rocks, bricks, and construction tools she had stolen from flabbergasted workers at them until they either went away or a costumed teenager took over. She wasn’t even recognizing a lot of the new ones, which honestly was pretty sad.  What was a Darwin? Why had Summers actually let a teenager name themselves Negasonic Teenage Warhead?

She had kept herself solidly out of sight of one Cyclops “Disappointed Dad Death Beam Stare” Summers. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea having a trademark, as he always seemed to know what direction to wave in. One of those little half-baked psychics had told him, no doubt. They were painfully untrained and if it made her head hurt it had to be even worse for them. She didn’t know where that old cripple Xavier had fucked off to, but he clearly had a job he wasn’t doing and she was probably the only qualified person in the state to even give a powerpoint presentation on the matter. Anybody could throw rocks and it seemed everything from Emma’s bachelors in Business and Finance to overwhelming psychic power was being underused. The bachelor was probably because she was pretty sure SHIELD knew where she was and didn’t want her getting her grubby little fingers on any actual positions of power, or at least that was what the paper tied around the rock they threw into her window said. The psychic power because of Magneto, who she had once seen at Bed Bath and Beyond and was forced to hide in the curtains section until she could make her escape.

She couldn’t call it serendipity this time, or unhappy coincidence. She had seen it on the news, eating chili on rice and flipping through Vogue. Protesters outside city hall, chanting something or another and - were those Confederate flags? Emma turned up the volume.

“Protesters have gathered outside city hall to protest the promotion of the Summers v. Board of Education case to the Supreme Court. Calling it a defilement of American values and an injustice to civil law, the march seems to be turning into a riot as protesters have begun attacking policemen and local businesses.”

“Janet, it appears the Westboro Baptist Church has appeared, and - “

Emma turned off the TV and went to go put on her shoes.

When she got there it was somehow worse than it looked on television. Lots of screaming, protestors on protesters, and people protesting protestors. Camera crews everywhere, as the local news always seemed to be running extremely good business, and Emma was beginning to see more and more signs raised into the air as a thick line of policemen stood there doing nothing. Emma had seen Summers give interviews on if the X-Men would stand against any protesters on their existences, and Summers had looked very morally superior as he said something about the first amendment and not to fight fire with fire. Emma, who tended to fight anybody who used something as impractical and hard to control as fire with a bullet and a mind crush, wasn’t impressed and she wasn’t seeing them in the crowds now.

She was just about to turn on her heel and grab some wagon wheels when there was a loud cheer celebrating a scarecrow on a stick being lifted into the air. It wasn’t a particularly good scarecrow, stuffing falling out of its sewn sides and head rolling akimbo, but even she could see the broad black X painted across its torso and the mockery of a visor on its face.

The scarecrow was set on fire, burning in effigy, and Emma saw red.

With one thought her pale and carefully lotioned skin turned into diamond, practically blinding in the cloudless August sun, and the heavy glare turned heads to her and away as she glided her way through the crowd that effortlessly parted for her. Nobody looked surprised to see her, as half the crowd was probably there just to see a mutant show up and beat their asses. She hated to oblige, but hopefully she was a little busy planning on how to best effectively put out a fire with somebody’s face. The rednecks holding the scarecrow and their loyal posse holding confederate flags - honestly, this was New York - went ruddy in the face and started shouting obscenities at her. It wasn’t anything compared to what they were thinking. If Emma was any less used to the depravity of mankind, its burning cold hate locked in the deep recesses of their own mind, it would have sickened her. If she had heard it less than half a year ago it would have barely fazed her. Now today, with a rapidly cooling bowl of chili and rice and a lifetime spent pretending she loved herself so much that she never felt loneliness or pain or sorrow, it only sparked a red hot flame of hatred so bright she could have sworn that Summer’s stupid lasers could have shot out of her own eyes. One of them even took a swing at her, breaking his hand on her jaw.

Normally in this kind of situation she would have find their deepest insecurities about their mother or the time they had been molested as a child and let them relive it a thousand times in the span of a few seconds, but today she cocked her hand back and punched them in the jaw as lightly as she physically could. She heard the trademark snap of bone and quickly moved onto the next guy, and the next, and when she turned around to the last man she found that all the rest had fled. The effigy had fallen on the floor and she stamped on it a little, letting the flames lick around her sneakers and quickly extinguish under her diamond heel. She turned around to the rest of the crowd, sneakers still on fire. Normally she would never be caught dead actually outside in sneakers, but she knew this would happen.

She cocked her hands on her hips and scowled. “What are you all looking at?” The crowd didn’t stop staring at her, quietly in awe. She sniffed. “Haven’t you ever seen a diamond woman before?”

They hadn’t, evidently. It had been very lucky for her that she was more of a white collar supervillain and had never made it on TV shouting about how she was going to kill the X-Men and wear their intestines as a necklace, but sometimes the lack of acknowledgement stung. Before the murmurs could get too accusatory she poked her way out of the crowd, ducking into an alleyway and letting the diamond ripple away. She had never understood the whole secret identity thing, but she was beginning to get that nobody really wanted to hire a woman who could kill them with her pinky. Bad for business, probably, even if this town seemed to be remarkably tolerant -

“Hope you’re looking forward to your lawsuit,” an amused voice said behind her, and Emma was embarrassed to say she jumped about a foot in the air. “I’m just wondering why you haven’t been doing that the whole time.”

“I’m surprised you don’t know.” Emma brushed the gem dust off her clothing primly. Unfortunate that it was so much sand once it left her body. “Why do you let them treat you like that? I never let anybody hurl obscenities at me I’m not already trying to beat to death.”

Summers was still amused. “They’ll come around one day.”

“You’ve been saying that since you were sixteen. I’ve seen the tapes.”

“Nice of you to defend my honor.”

“If I get a lawsuit you’re footing the bill,” Emma said automatically. “And I was not defending your honor. Just because this town is so lovey dovey to you after ten years of saving their asses doesn’t mean there aren’t sick freaks out there who hate us for living.”

“Us being the key word here.”

“Oh, I hate you for living for completely different reasons.”

Chief among being that Magneto had definitely seen that on television and was now probably on his way to her house to strangle her with a plastic bag. “I mean what I said earlier. I’d like you to have a talk with the team.”

“What are you,” Emma sneered, “my probation officer? Your terrorist lackey already has that covered.”

Summers raised his eyebrows. It was only the fact that Emma realized she could actually see his eyebrows that she realized he was actually in civvies: polo shirt, dad jeans, red glasses that had to clash with absolutely everything. At least her physical mutation was beautiful, and she could actually control it. No wonder he wore so much blue. “I’d really like for you to explain all of those passive aggressive comments about what I actually did to you.”

“Do I have to count them off for you?” She held up a hand and began ticking off her fingers. “Shut down the Hellfire Club - “

“You were supervillains!”

“And David Cameron fucked a pig, rich people can do what they want. You stole all of my money and made some pasty faced caterpillar take over my family’s company -”

“If you mean SHIELD seized your very illegal assets, then yes - “

“You made my boyfriend break up with me - “

“How do we make anyone break with anyone?”

“And,” Emma said louder, drowning out the obnoxious whine of his voice, “You let Public Enemy number one threaten to murder me, make me think I was actually about to die, and then tell me that if I ever stepped outside the simple life of a medieval serf he was going to send drills to bore into my eyes. I’d send you the therapy bills if I could ever actually explain all of this to anyone.”

When he took off that ridiculous get up and got into an entirely different ridiculous get up Summers looked like a completely different person. Emma realized belatedly that he couldn’t be any older than her, and he was sending civil rights cases to the Supreme Court. She was secretly buying cat toys at the dollar store in preparation for finally getting that cat.

He was still doing that thing where he thought really carefully about what he was going to say. Finally, he said, “I’m going to have to talk to Erik.”

“Who’s Erik?”

“In the meantime you should actually come back to the house with me so we can clear up any homicidal misunderstandings.”

Freedom was shining its golden light through a dark and damp subway tunnel. “Does this mean I don’t have to worry about Magneto strangling me in my sleep anymore?”

“That was never really an issue - he tends to like a fair fight. Come on, we can take my car.”

It was quite possibly one of the more awkward car rides Emma had ever been on, being that she refused to look anywhere but out the window and say anything but snide remarks about how she was surprised he was allowed to drive with those glasses on. Summers, as usual, was remarkably tolerant of her abuse. He wasn’t as much of a saint as he pretended, and she was determined to catch him in the act. All she knew about him was the he could weather anything until he couldn’t and at that point he would laser beam it in the face. It wasn’t a lot to know about someone.

The drive as long, made longer by the crippling awkwardness, but in the end not as long as she had thought. Before long they had rolled up to a gate, complete with a numerical code and what appeared to be a freaking thumbprint scanner, before they drove a little more into what actually looked like a two story garage.

“Xavier,” Scott said, as if that explained anything.

When Emma opened the garage door she found a small hoarde of children, which should have been far less surprising than it was. They weren’t quite children, not really, but they definitely looked younger than they did on television and from watching them punch monsters from across a street. The youngest girl couldn’t have been more than seven, chewing on a twizzler and looking thoroughly unimpressed.

“Told you she would show up,” the sassy infant said.

A much older girl with flowing purple hair down to her waist rolled her eyes. Dyed hair was so cheap looking. “Yes, we get it, you know things, Jesus.”

Another teenager with a short, frizzy afro looked at her like she was a particularly neat rattlesnake in a cage - a depressingly accurate comparison. “Are you really _the_ Emma Frost? The famous one?”

Emma drew herself up to her full height, tilting her chin up and loving that sweet feeling of being famously horrible. “Wouldn’t you -”

“She’s the one who beat up Lizardman Joe with a baseball bat!” A redheaded girl burst in, “and beat those demon things with her heel! Her heel!”

“What,” Emma said.

Every single one, save the still unimpressed seven year old, looked excited. She was beginning to realize, with a sinking feeling in her stomach, that it was for a different reason than she thought.

The purple haired girl looked her up and down appreciatively. “Scott didn’t say you had such a killer fashion sense, either. That white look is so forward.”

“Why did Scott bring you back to the house?”

“Are you an X-Man now?”

“She can’t be an X-Man if she doesn’t have any powers, dumbass,” the oldest one in the group said. “She’s just, like, an ally. An ally who beats up fascists.”

“Did anybody see what happened on the news before Scott turned it off?”

Scott muscled his way past Emma and through the crowd, smiling indulgently. “Give Emma some breathing room, guys. Remember what I said about hospitality?”

The teenagers scattered, one of them frantically cleaning up the kitchen as the older boy put a kettle on. Emma was having a hard time believing this was real.

She turned to Summers, who was carrying some groceries and putting them on a wooden table. They had entered directly into the kitchen, and somehow the reason he had caught her cracking jaws on live television was that he was making a grocery run. Or, when she appraised the groceries, a Costco run.

Lowering her voice, she asked, “You don’t give them little supervillain leaflets? Really, Summers?”

He shrugged, emptying a bag of mango slices. “We were pretty sure you were dead, there was no need to remind them of their eventual mortality. And by the time I knew you were alive you seemed fairly harmless.”

“ _Harmless_?”

“Yep.” An extremely large jar of peanut butter was extracted from the bag, and another kid ran forward to grab a few of them and began putting away milk into the industrial refrigerator. He turned to the older boy. “Julio, can you go grab Erik? I think he’s still in the greenhouse with Ororo.”

Julio ran off as Emma frantically tried to remember who Ororo was. It sounded foreign - was she that black woman who had actually struck her with lightning that one time? That was exquisitely painful.

She settled for looking around the kitchen at the bustling children. The two teen girls who looked close in age where discreetly trying to elbow each other out of the way and the seven year old had pulled a DS out of nowhere in a blatant display of ennui. The kettle blared, prompting one of the boys to pour the water and a Lipton teabag into a scuffed mug and set it on the table, smiling at her hopefully. She sat down and took a sip of the tea, because her mother raised her right. It was made exactly as she liked it, something that she intuitively knew she could blame the seven year old for. “Why did Scott bring you back here, anyway?”

“We’re here to talk about putting me on parole,” Emma drawled. “Or I hope so, anyway.”

“Cool!” No, it was not cool. “What did you do?”

“A lot of things.”

“How are we supposed to put you on parole?”

“Oh,” a voice said from the entryway, “there are a few ways.”

Emma jumped up from her seat, reflexively letting the diamond burst of her skin. The kids looked distinctly impressed. The older man wasn’t even in costume, much less wearing that stupid helmet, but it was unmistakably Magneto. Even if he was wearing trousers with dirt embedded in them and was holding a spade, which he somehow made look very intimidating by letting it float gently above his hand, she would recognize that wrinkly reminder of her mortality anywhere.

There was a brief moment where she almost dived for his mind, but when he raised an eyebrow she quickly thought better of it. There wasn’t a person in this room, save hopefully the seven year old, who couldn’t hurt her. That hadn’t happened in a very, very long time.  

“What are you even doing here?” she hissed. The kids looked confused.

“You do know I lead the New Mutants.”

She did not know that, but she wasn’t about to say it. “You aren’t here to finish me off, are you?” A horrible thought struck her. “Did you see the news broadcast?”

The kid who gave her tea perked up. “What news broadcast?”

“So you’re not going to kill me?”

“Why would I?” Magneto said.

“You had to have seen the news broadcast?”

“Was I supposed to?”

Emma waved her hands around, which was entirely undignified and made her look like an outraged chicken. “You said that you would know, that you would - track me down or whatever!”

Magneto raised an eyebrow again. “How on earth would I know something like that?”

Emma collapsed back onto the chair.

It hadn’t occurred to her that he would not know. He was Magneto, he had ways. Man had once lifted up a baseball stadium twenty feet into the air. He had legions of prepubescent mind readers at his beck and call, he had to have some way of knowing. She couldn’t have been living in fear this whole time for nothing.

Not that it was a real fear, not really. She could admit that it pretty rarely kept her up at night. That guillotine had been necessary, and Emma knew that without it she would have ended up in SHIELD custody within the month for making a man think she was his long lost daughter and sign over his fortune to her. Then she really would never see the light of day again, or daytime TV, or birds in the sky. Didn’t mean she didn’t resent him like hell for it though.

Emma massaged her forehead, already incredibly tired and uncomfortably aware that she had the full attention of everyone in the room. “Great. Just - just great. Anyone ever tell you you’re a total dick, Magneto?”

“I have a name,” he said blandly. “Besides, I’m retired.”

“You burned down a government building last week.”

“SHIELD asked me to do that.”

“And now you garden. Apparently.” In a desperate measure Emma took another sip of her tea and used the opportunity to sneak a glance at Summers. He still looked amused, that douchebag. “Don’t look at me like that, Summers.”

“Like you’ve been totally tricked into being a superhero?” He asked cheerfully. “I would call that very funny.”

The purple head girl gaped. “Rock girl is a superhero? Since when? She throws rocks at bad guys and hits them with sticks!”

“Honestly, Monet, don’t you see that rock girl is actually made out of rocks? It’s her superhero thing.”

“Oh, just shut it, Terry -”

“It’s not my fault you’re so judgemental.”

Summers didn’t look amused. “Girls.”

They shut up, quietly abashed. The younger boy piped up. “So is Rock Girl hanging out with us now? She seems really cool.”

It was ridiculous that she felt honored, but she kind of was. She couldn’t remember the last time anybody had called her cool. Scary, a bitch, a genius, yes. But not cool. Of course, they were still calling her Rock Girl. “You do understand I have no actual rock related powers.”

Julio rolled his eyes again. He looked to be about eighteen, clearly too mature for such little kids. “Darwin, they’re wood powers. She uses baseball bats way more than rocks.”

“But she’s made out of rocks now!” Darwin looked contemplative. “Maybe natural minerals?”

“It kind of looks more like glass.”

“It’s not glass!” Emma snapped. “It’s diamond, honestly.”

Monet was suddenly looking at her like she was a piece of steak. “You can’t be serious.”

Darwin, meanwhile, looked triumphant. “See? Rocks.”

Horrifically, Summers and Magneto still looked amused. Emma was filled with a strange kind of hate, the kind that made her want to grit her teeth instead of kill something. This so wasn’t fair. “My actual power is mind reading. I’m a psychic.”

The seven year old girl looked up, still looking criminally unimpressed. “You can turn into a diamond but your main superpower is reading minds? Lame.”

The other kids nodded. Terry said, “If you can mindcrush people like Xi’an or Ruthie can why didn’t you do that to Lizardman Joe?”

Emma looked back at Magneto accusingly. He shrugged.

“You can’t actually beat people up with reading their minds,” Darwin said in what he probably thought was a reasonable tone of voice. “The rock thing’s way cooler, trust me. I’ve never met anyone who can turn into a rock.”

“Ben Grimm?” Terry offered.

“But he’s a rock, like, all the time.”

“Do you think he was born like that?”

“I heard it was Reed Richard’s fault.”

Julio rolled his eyes. “Typical.”

“That’s the kind of thing I like to hear,” Scott butted in. “Now if you don’t mind, Erik and I have to negotiate the terms of Emma’s new X-Men contract.”

“ _My what now_.”

The small hoard of children cheered. “Does this mean that we get to give her the Initiation Rites?” Darwin asked excitedly.

“Time will tell,” Summers said, pretending to be mysterious. “Emma, my office?”

She went, but she sulked all the way there.

The office was ludicrously big, and judging from the book spines on the shelves it was probably Xavier’s. She doubted Summers knew anything about genetics, and he seemed to be a fairly predictable guy. Salt of the earth, Tom Joad kind of guy. She couldn’t help comparing his office against the one she used to have: hers all minimalism and sleek hardwood flooring, matte black walls against cream mod couches, while Summer’s looked like it was built in the fifties and had nice normal leather couches and a nice oak desk. But at the end of the day Summer’s office still existed and hers didn’t anymore, so who really won?

Summers must have seen the expression on her face. “I swear this is all the Professor. I do most of my paperwork on the desk in Kurt’s old room. But the lawyers like to meet in here, so I ended up having to keep most of the legal stuff here, and you know how it is.”

She didn’t, but she didn’t know if he knew that or not. He sat down on the cheap looking roller chair behind the desk, incongruous with the rest of the room but fitting in with the fact that Xavier likely hadn’t needed to buy a roller chair. The image of Xavier with little wheelies attached to the bottom of his chair was oddly ridiculous. Erik leaned on the side of the desk, folding his arms and looking placid. Placid like the sea before a storm, maybe.

Several important looking files were scattered on the desk, one of those folding picture frames standing guard over them. There seemed to be three separate pictures in it, but Emma didn’t get a good look. Summers brushed them away so he could rummage through the heavy oak drawers, runners squealing as he pulled them out. “What have you been doing lately?”

“Oh, you know,” Emma said archly, “buying a cat, watching daytime television, picking up birdwatching.”

“Very funny. No, seriously.”

The thought of nobody ever thinking she was the type of person to do something as mundane as watch TV saddened her. For all of his zen placidity Summers tended to think in black and white. She fought the urge to brush away the curtain of his mind and look inside - she had the feeling he would know somehow. For the time being she settled on looking at herself in the reflection in the red quartz, wondering what he saw. Probably the same thing everyone else did, really.

Now Magneto was also looking amused, though this time at the both of them. “Try the bottom drawer.”

“Here we go!” Summers said, emerging triumphant with the files. “Thanks a lot. Emma, what would you say are your qualifications?”

“My what now?”

He waved a hand. “You know, your degree, job experience, what have you. You don’t have to actually lie this time so it shouldn’t be hard.”

“Can I ask what job I’m actually applying for?” She had no idea the qualifications needed to be an X-Man. Probably something she sorely lacked, like a sense of empathy or a willingness to let passerby throw rotten vegetables at you. “Because if it’s to be one of your teenage lackeys I’m not interested.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. The actual X-Men team only hires everyone age twenty four all the way to two hundred.”

“Oh, did I miss Magneto’s birthday?”

“I can still change my mind about killing you,” Magneto said, so she shut up.

“We only have room for so many reformed supervillains at a time, so don’t worry about that. If you’re really into penance for your crimes you can go join the Avengers.”

“I don’t know what’s worse about that statement, the penance or the Avengers.”

Summers beamed, giving Emma the disgusting feeling that she had said something right. “Come on, just give me what you have.”

“If you insist.” Emma settled herself into her chair, forcing herself to relax from her ramrod posture. It was important to give the impression that she belonged everywhere, from a CEO’s office to the lowliest X-Mansion. Besides, it was hard to be in enemy territory when you hadn’t actually done anything wrong. If they intended on punishing her for past wounds they would have years ago, and she hadn’t done anything since then. There was no reason to be wary of the smiling man in sunglasses behind the desk and the muscular man leaning at its side.

Lucky for them, Emma had decided to stop feeling fear in first grade and had never felt it since. Had never felt it until Magneto, slouching at that desk, threatened to send those drill bits into her eyes. But there was no use holding a grudge that you couldn’t collect on.

“Graduated Stanford summa cum laude in Business and Finances. Worked as a financial advisor for Goldman Sachs before my father died and I inherited the majority stock in Frost International.” She shrugged. She hadn’t ever actually had an interview before and she didn’t know how it worked. “Once all of that got too boring a got a better offer.”

“The Hellfire Club.”

“Out of everything you can call that, it was never boring.”

Which wasn’t quite true. You could only listen to Sebastian Shaw go on about how he would make the US Secretary of Defense lick his shoe until it shined so many times until it got rather old.

Summers leaned back in his chair, using one antique fountain pen to scratch at his arm. “So your life story is that you were born into incredible wealth, worked at Goldman Sacs, inherited a company, and then joined the Bullingdon club and became a supervillain?”

“That’s the official line, yes.”

He didn’t ask about the unofficial one, thank goodness. Instead he said, “Why? You didn’t need to steal anything. I’m not seeing any real desire for world domination here, considering the fact that you’re so rich you’re part of the way there. You have an incredible mutation and overwhelming power, both socially and mentally. I know you would like to pretend that you were going along with your boyfriend but we both know better than that. Why even do it? There’s no point.”

What kind of question was that? Of course there was a point. Basic assumption of economics was that everybody did something for a reason, everybody acted rationally. Rationally for them, that is, rationally for what they wanted.

The point was for the same reason she had ruined that little girl’s relationship with her father. The same reason she killed the business of the woman who called her a slut. The same reason an old sorority big sister had showed her an excellent strip joint and Emma had found the secret society hidden inside, entranced with its mystery and allure, the handsome man who promised her everything she didn’t already have.

“Because I could,” Emma said simply.

The room was quiet for a moment.

Magneto reached over and picked up one of the files, flipping through it like it was a magazine. He stopped at one of the pages, one that looked something like a ledger.

“Stop me if you’ve heard this one before,” Magneto said. “Rich little girl who would have been perfectly happy if it wasn’t for the fact that she was ten times as smart as her peers. Parents who would have loved her if she hadn’t been smarter than them too. Develops a superiority complex due to feelings of alienation and claws her way to social power. Develops a mutation - mental to match her genius, physical to match her invulnerability. Parties through high school, unchallenged by anything. Parties through college. Probably part of a sorority. If I’m wrong anywhere please stop me.”

Emma sat silently, fuming. This was cruel, cowardly and degrading, coercing a woman to sit there and be berated and had every single aspect of her life that stayed mediocre no matter how hard she tried. She was more complicated than that. She had to be.

“Takes pride in her appearance and image, from her clothing to her bearing. Never known to actually give up on anything, despite our best efforts. Taken pains to avoid physically harming a minor. Currently the hero of five teenagers standing in the kitchen gossiping. Has not killed anyone, save in the most subtle and insidious of ways.” He sighed, looking up from the file but never making direct eye contact with her. “I’m a worse person than you are, Emma. I saw that when I met you in that sewer. You took the chance I gave you and made something real out of it. You’ve had four months of constant and unending humiliation, up to and including sitting in this room right now, and although almost none of your choices are justifiable or moral your desperate claims of supervillainy are no more who you are than your pair of heels.”

He tossed the file he was holding lightly on the desk in front of her, and she leaned forward to look at it. It actually was a ledger - and from the looks of it a rather horrific one. She glanced at Summers, who nodded encouragingly, and she picked it up and rapidly started flipping through it.

“Not that I don’t appreciate taking a break from this very special episode, but what is this supposed to be?” She squinted closer at the page. “Summers, this is one of the worst books I’ve ever seen. Do you even know how to do this at all?”

“Nope,” Summers said cheerfully, swivelling slightly in his chair and putting his hands behind his head. He was smirking, goddamit. “I’m a homemaker and part time superhero with twenty other things on his mind. I don’t have a head for finances at all.”

She knew where this was going, but at this moment her horror was drowning her good sense. Magneto dropped a few more files on the table and she quickly began leaving through them. “Please tell me you at least have a wealth manager.”

“I think so? Apparently we have a stock portfolio too but I’ve never actually touched that.”

Emma screamed silently into her fist. “Do you have any actual clue as to Xavier’s net worth?”

Summers told her.

She screamed silently into her first again. “This is horrible. Hire an accountant. Wealth manager. Bookkeeper. Anything, just don’t make me look at this anymore.”

“That depends,” Summers said cheerfully, and somehow Emma got the sense that Summers had tracked her down, kidnapped her, subjected her to teenagers, took her into his office and listed off an unsettlingly large list of her faults and life story, for this exact moment. “Are you looking for a job?”

Depressingly, she was. Emma tossed the file back on the desk, trying to hide her twitching fingers. Magneto had been right: nothing had ever really challenged her, the adrenaline rush of committing an incredible number of white collar crimes only ever coming close. “I’m not moving into your little mansion and playing housewife.”

“God, that’d be horrific.” She could read the faint mental imprint of him rolling his eyes. “I have no desire to deal with you hogging the bathroom. No, maybe just a nine-to-five. Or whatever, you can set your own hours, I do not actually care. Since I have no idea what you’re doing I’m not your boss.”

“Thank god.”

“So is that a yes?” He was grinning again, disgustingly.

“That depends.” Emma leaned back in her own chair. This, she could do. “How’s your health insurance?”

They went back and forth on that for a while, her mind already made up by her fourth question but wanting to see how far she could push it. By the end of it she had enough salary for a much larger apartment, flexible hours and the option to work from home just so long as there was real work involved, and free sessions in the Danger Room. She had barely any idea what that was, but it sounded - well, challenging.

“I’m not shaking your hand, Summers.”

He stood up anyway, smile bright and satisfied. Magneto mostly just looked smug. She looked back at Summers again - the chiseled, strong bone structure, the large and ropey biceps, the dad jeans and goofy smiles.

“I think you can just call me Scott now.”

Emma had a thought as horrific as a steam ending colliding with a brick wall, so disgusting like sneakers with an A waist dress, like her badly knitted afghan and the library book splayed dog-eared on her living room sofa:

Scott was kind of cute.

 


End file.
